First Dawn by Mike Moscoe/Shepherd

Finished on 11Feb.

The others of his I've read I judged to be fun if derivative and simplistic - space opera - this one is sloppy and annoying, don't let me forget repetitive - I lost count of the number of wolves some man or other had stared down. Bad grammar and spelling infuriate me - I do understand that the method for turning print into electronic text has some peculiarities - but not such as to turn "courts martial" into "courts marshal." I can't cite all the grammar problems - "the path they had rode that morning" sticks in my mind. I also am fully aware that none of us is perfect, and even the best of editors will occasionally miss something. This, however, is utterly absurd. I have read better from high school sophomores.

So much for mechanics. The word choice and usage is so poor ("they were just falling the tree") that I have formed a theory. Moscoe's eleven-year-old daughter wrote it; alternatively, Moscoe himself wrote it when he was eleven. To a pre-adolescent, even a fairly well-read pre-adolescent "falling a tree" might make more sense than "felling a tree" and said pre-adolescent would quite likely never have encountered the word "martial" in print but would have heard it and formed an image in the form of a western marshal or today's federal marshal. He/she probably has a mental image of a courtroom peopled by federal agents.

I have let pass many peculiarities such as those mentioned above - but can't let this lie. Down toward the end - at 92% - Location 5212 - he calls his heroine by the name of his other heroine. Lt. Launa becomes Kris, really? Somehow I can't dismiss that as a digital transcription error.

Then there is the utter idiocy of the science - or lack thereof. What, me worry about time anomalies? Why ever do a thing like that? And, despite characters tromping heedlessly about changing the past, the epilogue returns to the "present" where, although LA is missing from its former location - the same characters with the same names are hanging around. Oh well. At least the experimental dog turns up.